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Only a tiny fraction of them realize they aren't getting any traffic and have turned to SEO companies for help. This means building separate web sites that redirect "targeted" and "relevant" traffic to the dealers web sites. Or, doorway style pages that have to be clicked through. The auto dealer gets to keep his choice of web sites and gets "targeted" and "relevant" traffic.
EVERYONE WINS including Google!
Without the help of SEO NO ONE WOULD WIN, including Google. So doesn't it make sense for "spam" to be about the relevance of the search to the information delivered rather than the method of delivery?
It would seem to me that SEO and Google should actually be on the sames team rather than opponents.
Just some random thoughts...
-s-
I assume you are talking about two of the Big 3? GM/Ford/Dahmler-Chrysler?
Many dealers have independent web sites (domains), and have had so for several years. I know, because that is how I got into SEO. We designed online software that would import Chrylser/Plymouth/Dodge dealers new vehicle inventory into an online DB automatically for the dealer.
I would estimate more than 50% of dealers have their own domain. What methodology they use to index in Google is their business... :)
They both have great sales teams selling sites that can't get found on Google.
I would bet the automotive industry is not alone with this problem.
When the search and the results are relevant, how can that be called SPAM?
-s-
SEO is not inherently unethical; bait-and-switch is.
Please correct me if I'm wrong.
There are lots of proper ways to make a site's content indexable, even if it uses a lot of flash. But IMHO (and apparently in Google's HO as well), what he's describing is not the way to go.
There was at least one good discussion of Flash technology recently that brought up these same issues.
everyone designing pages specifically for google is only gonna slow down progress.
[edited by: Marcia at 3:19 am (utc) on Feb. 3, 2003]
[edit reason] denigrating comment removed per TOS [/edit]
The design professional must consider a whole set of things when deciding what formats and coding to use in designing websites. Part of that is search engine indexibility. As one small example, search engines do have problems indexing flash - they are much better at indexing plain text. Any designer should know that before designing in flash, and consider other promotion options such as PPC before complaining after the fact.
Flash advocates (and many of them ive noticed in WebmasterWorld are those that design flash sites for a living, which is understandable and perfectly legitimate), are passionate about their arguments, but labelling and insulting those who have other views as dinosaurs is hardly useful. In my view, they are simply realists.
There are very good reasons for the difficulties in indexing flash content, just the same as indexing any graphic or high tech content, including the resources required and how you can "rank" flash pages fairly with other pages.
If sometime in the future search engines can index flash content well, I may well use it, but im assuming by that time, free promotion in search engines will be a fairly insignificant part of web promotion activity.
If i had an art site, or a site selling things specifically for flash professionals I would consider using flash anyway, but promoting it in other ways than using SEO would be essential if I wanted a broader audience than my friends.
My clients call for flash... I see no other reason to warn them off about it when 98% of thier target audience can veiw flash, other than the fact that they cannot be indexed without resorting to dodgy tactics and violating a SE TOS if they want visibility via search engines. My clients want to use the technology. I am sick of telling them that they are wrong when only usability experts who can change their tune at the drop of a paycheck and search engines are the ones who feel that way.
I would say that to a room packed full of slash-dotters without fear.
Sorry to upset you all with the nostalgists comment, but that's what i feel like when we want our web experience to resemble that of 1995 and prior.
Our experience can be so much less stale than black, 14 point times new roman on a white background and there was a time that each and every one of us aspired to something more. I'm not so sure that holds true today.
Hope this doesn't bring the attention of Brett or a stern repremand. I feel and so will others that my point - if not my eloquence - is valid.
It is a shame that there is not a good way to index flash sites yet. To me, it seems like it may be the difference between mac and pc. Style vs. functionality
I believe this is getting of topic, but if memory serves, this topic was discussed not to long ago. Maybe one of the admin's can point you in the direction of the thread as I am not very proficient at searching the archives myself.
I don't think it's so much a search engine's reluctance to index flash as it is their inability. How would you propose they do so? OCR?
All I do know is that "my" public asks for it and have been asking for it for quite some time. Somebody needs to take a step or SE's need to allow cloaking.
FAST took the first step... now the other engines need to follow suit.
Flash was only a small part it - it also included sites pulled from a db and frames.
Google's answer might be not to use those things but then is it reasonable for everyone to have a flat, text based web site if they want to get Googlized?
-s-
- The search engine could OCR the flash site. This would probably be very inaccurate, because the OCR technology isn't there yet, especially since no particular portion of the flash movie is designated as text, so the search engine could conceivably take a picture of a tree and try to convert it to the most probable text (which it is not).
- The webmaster could have a hidden portion of the site (a <noflash> tag?) that has the text of the site in it, for search engines, and browsers that don't support flash, to pick up. The problem here, of course, is that there's no way to know if the webmaster is using the actual text from the flash, or just keyword spamming.
The problem is that text in flash is not necessarily stored as text in the SWF file, so the search engine can't simply extract it.
This is a technical limitation.. it is *not* the search engines saying "We don't want to index flash (or other modern web design techniques)."
The webmaster could have a hidden portion of the site (a <noflash> tag?) that has the text of the site in it, for search engines, and browsers that don't support flash, to pick up. The problem here, of course, is that there's no way to know if the webmaster is using the actual text from the flash, or just keyword spamming.
Exactly. It's like Meta-Tag Spam: The Sequel.
For this just get links with good anchors.
Although I have never attempted a Flash Site - Shockwave is a dream.
Link, links, and more links - the best results is a 2K html page with Shockwave (full screen) and few hundred relevant links and #1 ranked position >> 6.5 million competitive pages.
"Off-page", "on-topic" relevance is the key here.
I've seen a some humor sites and such effectively use flash. To be honest, never an e-commerce site that used flash well. If nothing else, grossly slows things down in most instance. Most of the world is still on dial up. And, as others pointed out, precisely *how* are search engines supposed to directly index flash? The OCR idea doesn't sound feasible to me, and surely not available today. The blame here belongs on either Flash designers who created a format not indexable by SEs, or webmasters who care about being indexed by SEs using Flash who shouldn't.
and it will increasingly become less of a problem for the demand for the work of flash designers as PPC, PPI and other paid indexing makes free search engine indexing less of a consideration for clients.
Its always key to keep in mind that Search engines as we know them are TEXT search engines. OK there is some very early experients with image indexing and aural indexing, but these are in primitive, experimental stages. SE's do index PDF, *.doc etc simply because these can be reduced to text.
Flash as a technique is primarily visual. Search engines simply cant index images. Even the image search of search engines use filenames or surrounding text to catalogue them, not the actual file. Thats is because search engines are TEXT indexes, nothing else.. everything is reduced to text.
Getting back to the title of the thread, cloaking does not help SEs as it is too open to spam. SEs have to have a way to obkectively rank the actual content of a document wheter it is text, html, pdf or whatever. There is no way that search engines can. Fast does index flash, but there is no way they can rank them by relevance objectively.
The best advice I can give to flash designers is to convince clients that there are ways to promote flash sites other than through free indexes. I dont know about you, but PPC pomotional costs dont look to bad for me compared to the human time and unknowns involved in SEO. And im sure that the gap will decrease.
Surely if flash is embedded in a page rather than being a "flash site" as such, there are still many ways to get it indexed. There is still the title and metatags yes? and hyperlinked terms from external sites?
"The SDK includes an application named ‘swf2html’. Swf2html extracts text and links from a Macromedia Flash .SWF file, and returns the data to stdout or as an HTML document. Swf2html is provided as a compiled application, and as a static library for linked library implementation. For complete functionality, see the file Readme.htm included in the SDK." -Macromedia
Your opinion of whether or not an .swf file is a quality vehical for distribution of information and of it's validity as an e-commerce solution is of no consequence in my opinion.
Any reason why Search engines are not using it? I guess if it holds promise in helping the quality of their SERPS SEs will use it. I doubt there is any "conspiracy" not to index flash, so therefore excuses do not come into it.
Its obviously in MM's interests to get it used, so i guess they are doing the best they can.
Is it just that it's new or are there other problems - overhead to use it? performance issues? quality and usability of the conversion? compatability with swf versions etc?
Definately what IId like to see is an indciation that a file or page is a flash/swf format before i decide to go there. I do admit to generally avoiding flash and pdf, only for practical reasons due to the set up of my laptop and the way i use the web (to get text info for research rather than presentations). That just one person and im sure many dont mind. But i would be wary of search engines that send me to any large or high memory usage documents/pages without warning me first. I look at the page sizes everty time, and i would want this to work for flash too.
You'd get thousands of 1x1 swf files packed with keywords, links etc sprouting up
<Macromedia Flash Search Engine SDK is already being employed by FAST. The technology is there and the lack of it is not a legitimate excuse.
"The SDK includes an application named ‘swf2html’. Swf2html extracts text and links from a Macromedia Flash .SWF file, and returns the data to stdout or as an HTML document. Swf2html is provided as a compiled application, and as a static library for linked library implementation. For complete functionality, see the file Readme.htm included in the SDK." -Macromedia>
When designing in flash, the effects that can be done on text are minimal. So often, text is converted to a graphic so that many more effects can be applied to it. The process of converting the text to a graphic would render the "swf2html" inoperable, and that "text" would not be extracted, because it isn't saved as text. Though the user would still read it as such, a convertor/extracter, or search engine, would not.
Still not a reliable method.
